Kensington Palace exhibition explores Sophia Duleep Singh, Punjabi princess and suffragette

Kensington Palace in London presents 'The Last Princesses of Punjab,' an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of Sophia Duleep Singh's 1876 birth. The show examines her transformation from a royal goddaughter of Queen Victoria into a militant suffragette and critic of British imperialism. Sophia, daughter of the last Sikh Empire maharaja Duleep Singh, participated in the notorious 'Black Friday' protest of November 1910, where police violently suppressed women demanding voting rights, arresting 116 including the princess. Her activism extended to selling the Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court Palace and defying the 1911 census. The exhibition also highlights her sisters Bamba and Catherine, who respectively claimed ancestral lands in Lahore and aided Jewish families fleeing Nazis. Sophia's life intersected with colonial history: her grandfather Ranjit Singh founded the Sikh Empire in 1799, and her father was forced to surrender the Koh-i-Noor diamond to Queen Victoria. Historian Mishka Sinha notes the women 'found ways to exert influence and forge their own identity.' After World War I, Sophia volunteered as a nurse for Indian soldiers. She died in 1948, the year after Indian independence. The exhibition features portraits, photographs from the Peter Bance Collection, and surveillance records displayed at the British Library in 2020.